While Ayrton Senna was a passionate man, not many had seen him shed a tear. Before his sad demise, he had grown extremely close to his girlfriend, Adriane Galisteu. Following the first qualifying session, Galisteu was going to fly to watch him race at the San Marino GP. However, before she could even catch her flight, Senna began to sob while talking to her on the phone.
Growing restless, Senna told Galisteu that he couldn’t wait to see her. In his biography, The Life of Senna, she recalled having a conversation with the F1 legend about their relationship after which, “he burst into tears.”
Adriane was quoted as saying, “Can you imagine what it is like to receive a call from Ayrton Senna when he bursts into tears?” She added, “I felt absolute panic and kept asking him what happened, what happened?”
The reason behind Senna’s emotional outburst was Rubens Barrichello’s horrific crash. Barrichello hit a curb at 140 mph and flew into the tire barriers. The incident jolted Senna as Barrichello suffered a broken nose and some bruised ribs as a result.
Senna was the first person Barrichello recalls seeing after regaining consciousness in the hospital. Senna reassured Barrichello that everything was going to be alright.
However, Senna himself could not control his emotions. Barrichello recalls seeing Senna’s eyes well up. The then-Jordan driver also stressed that this was very unlike Senna, who seldom showed his emotions.
Ayrton Senna was never the same after Rubens Barrichello’s crash
The crash was enough to give Ayrton Senna a reminder of his own mortality. A number of people recall seeing a visible change in him the day Barrichello crashed.
Following the completion of the qualifying session that day, Senna sat down for an interview with Mark Fogarty from Carweek Magazine. Fogarty recalls Senna fumbling and finding it difficult to complete sentences. This again was unlike Senna as Fogarty remembers him to be a man who was eloquent in his speech.
Another man who saw a change in Senna that day was his private jet’s pilot, Owen O’Mahoney. Mahoney had been pestering Senna to give him some autographed photos of them together.
Senna being as concentrated as ever over a racing weekend kept delaying. However, after Barrichello’s crash, Senna took out some photos from his briefcase and signed them for his pilot.
O’Mahoney recalls, “The odd thing was that he gave them to me in the middle of practice. It was so out of character for him to think about anything other than racing. It was almost as if he wanted to tie up loose ends.”
Meanwhile, another issue bothering Senna was his family’s disapproval of his relationship with Galisteu. In fact, as per the biography, his brother, Leonardo, had come to stay with him that weekend to persuade him to break up with Galisteu. Perhaps that was another stressful factor that made him tear up twice in one day.
